June 28, 2006
Words
The Revised Standard Version of the New Testament was hot off the presses about the time I started to seminary. It created quite a stir. So much so that an east coast country preacher made the Associated Press when he burned a copy in church one Sunday and said something like, “If the King James Version of the Bible was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us.”
Words have power. They can move us to gentleness and truth or they can drive us into rebellion and chaos. They’re central to our manner of becoming human, and becoming human is what life is all about. Words are primarily symbols, icons, windows through which we can discover and grasp a greater, more central reality of ourselves, our neighbors, our environment, our God. In this sense, at least, words are holy.
The idea is so important that Evangelist John thought it altogether appropriate — and then some — to express what he meant by Jesus, by the Word becoming flesh. He was also fully aware of how devastating a notion this is for us, how so often and maybe even more often, we simply don’t get it. To read his prologue again whenever we have the chance never ceases to challenge and inspire and remind [Jn 1.1-14].
On the other hand, to assume for words in themselves an infallibility, an inerrancy, is to destroy the beauty of them as icons and to turn them into idols. The very first Commandment in the Decalogue stands there to remind us of that. That it is an insult to God for it risks replacing her with her creation, with the very symbols through which she reveals herself and her majesty. Even the pronoun we use for God, you’ll notice, has such power.
That this travesty, this idolatry, has been broadcast in the name of the Judaeo-Christian tradition itself is a betrayal of what the great saga of Scripture’s story of our spiritual genealogy can mean for us. It is this kind of manipulation that blinds us to the creative energy of metaphor and of the great truths of the myths that undergird our national heritage and the laws by which we govern ourselves. The flag is such a metaphor. The Bible is such a symbol. Merely burning them says far more about the arsonist than about what they stand for, than about what we can see through them.